by Jeff Mackler, published on Socialist Action, June 14, 2023
“U.S. had intelligence of detailed Ukrainian plan to attack Nord Stream pipeline” was the Washington Post’s June 6, 2023 headline. A blatant lie if there ever was one – a corporate media-manufactured lie, in concert with the US government, aimed at covering up US imperialism’s multi billion and trillion dollar Ukraine war of conquest and economic domination, including its blowing up of the Nord Stream pipelines.
The Teixeira Revelations
But let us follow the lie through to the truth about the US/NATO proxy war in Ukraine today. Subtitled, “THE DISCORD LEAKS,” referring to the online chat Discord platform used by Massachusetts Air National Guard whistleblower Jack Teixeira, one of Teixeira’s online friends subsequently told The Post that there was more to the revelations than The Post originally reported.
“The Post had restricted Teixeira’s Pentagon leaks to detailed accounts of the US routinely spying on its enemies and allies alike, including Iran and North Korea, as well as Britain, Canada, South Korea and Israel.” The documents revealed “profound U.S. concerns about the [Ukraine] war’s trajectory and Kyiv’s capacity to wage a successful offensive against Russian forces.” The Pentagon files included “summaries of human intelligence on high-level conversations between world leaders, as well as information about advanced satellite technology the United States uses to spy.” They once again confirm that the US imperialist beast, with a “national security” apparatus of some 18 separate agencies employing literally six million personnel with security clearances, knows no limits to advancing the interests of the US ruling rich.
That a single individual like Teixeira, nicked-named “OG,” a rightwing online gossiping chat enthusiast trying to impress his friends, or more serious principled antiwar whistleblowers like the magnificent recently deceased Daniel Ellsberg (Pentagon Papers), or Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning, or Julian Assange, could throw a monkey wrench into the war machine’s apparatus, informs us once again that, in time, there is no hiding imperialism’s base deeds.
That the US and a range of European intelligence agencies knew three months in advance, in June 2022, of the planned September 26, 2022 Nord Stream pipeline obliteration, according to the second round of Teixeira revelations, was initially self-censored by The Post. No doubt the delay stemmed from the disclosure that the Pentagon documents revealed previously denied details of the undersea Nord Stream bombing.
The Post was eventually explicit in confirming: that the US knew well in advance of the planned bombing stating, “The CIA learned last June, via a European spy agency that a six-person team of Ukrainian special operations forces intended to sabotage the Russia-to-Germany natural gas project.”
Seymour Hersh: “How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline”
In this writer’s view that an unnamed “European spy agency” had to inform US imperialism’s spymasters of Ukraine’s alleged planned military operations is preposterous! Few, if any, serious observers of the US-instigated, orchestrated, financed – to the tune of $100 billion plus to date – US/NATO proxy war against Russia doubt that the US scrutinizes, if not orchestrates Ukraine’s every critical operation. That Ukraine would or could unilaterally undertake a multi-trillion dollar project aimed at substituting US imperialism’s fracked natural gas – four times more expensive than Russia’s, as we shall see, flies in the face of the facts.
Pulitzer Prize journalist Seymour Hersh’s Feb. 3, 2023 Substack exposé entitled, “How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline” far exceeds the standard of truth than the kept corporate media. Hersh’s account includes the details of the highly detailed, advanced technology and sophisticated material requirements to accomplish the pipeline bombing but explicitly places the US imperialist culprit on center stage as opposed to The Post’s Ukrainian government. Said Hersh, “The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now.”
“Last June, 2022,” according to Hersh’s sources,
“[US] Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, [Baltic Sea Operations] planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, [September 26] destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning…
“Two of the pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade. A second pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational.”
Indeed, massive US pressure on the German government forced German leaders to halt construction. (See Germany puts a stop to Nord Stream 2, a key Russian natural gas pipeline, NYT, Feb. 22, 2022).
The June 2022 BALTOPS 22 maneuvers were based on a US Naval Strike Force. They included 13 days of naval operations in the area of the pipelines, 47 ships, 89 aircraft and 7,000 personnel. Sixteen NATO-allied nations participated. The operations included high tech exercises related to submarine mining and de-mining operations. [See: The June 41, 2022 Seapowermagazine.org .]
“The U.S. 6th Fleet,” Seapower continues, “led by the USS Kearsarge, coordinated BALT OPS 22. The Kearsarge remained in the immediate area for months after BALT OPS 22 ended. The USS Kearsarge tested special drone underwater-vehicle, mine-hunting technology in the Baltic Sea, just off the coast of the Danish island of Bornholm, near the Nord Stream pipelines.”
Corporate Media/US Government Cover-up
Following the Teixeira revelations both The Post and the NYT submitted detailed questions to the US government and the CIA aimed at learning whether the Biden administration had advance knowledge of the Nord Stream bombings, only to be told that the US had no such knowledge. “No comment!” was the initial response.
But a few days later, on June 14, 2023, The Times, reported yet another concocted US version of the pipeline bombing. Their headline read, “C.I.A. Told Ukraine Last Summer It Should Not Attack Nord Stream Pipelines.”
The second article reads:
“Dutch intelligence officials shared information with the C.I.A. in June 2022 that they had learned the Ukrainian military had been planning an operation using divers to blow up one of the pipelines….”
“The Central Intelligence Agency told Ukrainian officials last summer that it had learned of what it thought was an aborted plot by the Ukrainians to attack the Nord Stream pipelines, and the agency reinforced its objection to any such operation, U.S. officials said.”
The remainder of the article is a contorted obfuscation aimed at reinforcing the US lie that it was opposed to blowing up the pipelines, not to mention that the US planned and carried out the operation in the first place!
Indeed, multiple statements over the years by leading US officials, including President Biden, more than demonstrated US intentions.
US Record of Opposition to Nord Stream
In recounting US long-term opposition to Nord Stream 2, U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, warned on Nov. 13, 2018, that then-President Donald Trump had many ways to stop Nord Stream 2: “We have not deployed the full set of tools yet that could significantly undermine if not outright stop the project,” said Sondland. (Reuters, Nov. 13, 2018)
U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell similarly sent openly threatening letters to German companies working on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Grenell warned, ”We emphasize that companies involved in Russian energy exports are taking part in something that could prompt a significant risk of sanctions.” (Bild am Sonntag, Jan 13, 2019)
During a Feb. 2022 state visit with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz President Biden repeated the threats. At a White House press conference, he asserted that the US was “capable” of shutting down Nord Stream 2 in the Baltic Sea if Russia invaded Ukraine.
A Feb. 7 Twitter post, featured a reporter asking Biden, “But how will you do that, exactly since the project is in Germany’s control?” Biden responded, “I promise you we will be able to do that.”
US Multi-trillion Dollar Fossil Fuel War Gambit
The Nord Stream pipelines project were a $23 billion joint Russian-German venture, with Russia’s Gazprom Corporation holding a 51 percent controlling interest along with lesser amounts held by German, Italian and French corporations.
The U.S.-engineered sabotage of Russia’s Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, as we shall see, aimed at guaranteeing the success of the U.S. $trillion Ukraine fossil fuel war gambit to permanently substitute U.S.-fracked Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) for Russia’s significantly less expensive fossil fuels. The US sabotage instantly eliminated Russia as the chief fossil fuel supplier to Germany and much of Europe. It aimed at prolonging, perhaps for years, the US-instigated and financed war in Ukraine, simultaneously guaranteeing addition $trillions to the highly monopolized US military-industrial complex and the similarly monopolized US fossil fuel behemoths.
With the decimation of the Nord Stream pipelines running under the US/NATO-controlled Baltic Sea, some fifty percent of the European Union’s gas supplies via Germany were instantly terminated, compelling the recipient nations to turn in desperation as winter approached to the world’s leading US fossil fuel cartels, including Exxon Mobile, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Occidental… at significantly higher prices to boot. French officials bitterly complained that US corporations soon after proposed to replace Russia’s fossil fuel at four times the Russian rate. War is good for capitalist profits. Endless wars are even better!
That Nord Stream 2, with double the capacity of Nord Stream 1, was set to open in February 2022, was unacceptable to the US ruling class. In the capitalist imperialist mindset war, regardless of the cost in human lives and the environment itself, is but an extension of preserving and extending the economic interests of the ruling class elites.
We will only add here that a UN environmental agency reported that the explosions resulted in “the largest single release of methane — a powerful climate-damaging, greenhouse gas, [87 times as potent as CO2], ever recorded.” The pipelines were rendered either permanently destroyed or requiring years of repair.
US Planned Ukraine War Long In Advance
With these monstrous and meticulously calculated acts of war, followed by the truck bombing of Russia’s land bridge to Crimea, the US imperialist beast demonstrated once again that its major policy decisions were planned and prepared well in advance of Russia’s Feb. 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Indeed, the origins of the present war began eight years earlier with the Feb. 2014 U.S.-abetted fascist-led coup that seized control of the Ukrainian Rada (Parliament), banned the government’s elected majority parties, installed some half dozen fascists of the Svoboda and Right Sector parties to top government posts, voided Ukraine’s negotiated bailout agreements with Russia (substituting onerous financial agreements with the European Union and IMF), banned the Russian language and ordered the Ukrainian Army to physically obliterate all opposition to the coup. [For a detailed account of the coup, see “Ukraine: No To the U.S.-orchestrated War and Fascist Coup” at socialistaction.org and the Socialist Action 2014 pamphlet entitled, “Ukraine in Turmoil.”]
The US ruling class is delighted with the present Ukraine war, yet another endless war aimed at the disintegration, if not dismemberment of Russia, while the US replaces it as Europe’s chief deadly fossil fuel supplier in perpetuity. Meanwhile the earth is ever flooded and burns while billions of people are threatened with irreversible catastrophe.
Socialism: Revolutionary Alternative to Capitalist War and Plunder
The US ruling elite know no alternative other than to unleash their repressive forces against any and all opponents, should the need arise. Their greatest fear is to be confronted with an organized and overwhelming revolutionary socialist alternative power in a society in revolutionary ferment – a power that represents the interests of the vast majority and is organized and prepared to defend these interests at all costs. The systematic organization of this alternative today stands before all serious antiwar and social justice fighters.
In this eventuality, the ruling elite never reject the fascist option, that is, the physical elimination of all fighting working class organizations and their allies among the oppressed masses. Today, Donald Trump’s posing this neo-fascist perspective is premature in their view, but never to be excluded, especially when the sham of the billionaire-controlled system of capitalist “democracy” loses its hold on the mass of working people.
Jeff Mackler is the national secretary of Socialist Action. He is also Socialist Action’s candidate for U.S. President in the 2020 elections and he was the Socialist Action candidate for President in 2016. Mackler founded Northern California Climate Mobilization, is a longtime teacher and union activist with the American Federation of Teachers in Hayward, California and is director of the Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal.